At the Foot of the Mountain: Nature and the Art of Soul Healing

Contents

Before The Beginning And After The End …

The Mountain

Neighbors

My Eye

Emmerns

The White Deer

Humus

The Salmon

The Well

Open Hands

The Great Bear

Chambered Nautilus

Phoenix

Biopoetics

Marigold

Seven-Petaled Lotus

Invisible Wings

A Happy Childhood

In The Beginning . .

About The Author

To the angels in our lives—those messengers from God who help us to live honestly and to the full.

Other Books by Alla Renée Bozarth

(Alia Bozarth-Campbell)

Paulist Press and LuraMedia (second edition)

Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey

The University of Alabama Press

The Words Body: An Incarnational

Aesthetic of Interpretation

CompCare Publishers

Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello:

Grieving Well through All Kinds

of Loss

Journey Through Grief

Wisdom House Press (Poetry)

Gynergy

In the Name of the Bee & the Bear

& the Butterfly

Sparrow Songs

Sheed and Ward

Loves Prism: Reflections from

the Heart of a Woman

North Star Press

Stars in Your Bones:

Emerging Signposts on Our

Spiritual Journeys

Audio Tapes by Alla Renée Bozarth

CompCare Publishers

Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello

Dance for Me When I Die

Before the Beginning and after the End …

This book catches me on the wing.

It is a book of Between. So it is a true-to-life book, a soul-making book. But unlike tidy fiction, it has no plot. My life and soul have no plot—only themes. Here are themes of flight, as in music, as in a fugue.

When I wrote these themes into form some years ago, I was on the way. I was up in the air. My only map was faith. I had embarked on a destiny journey with no idea of my destination. I was telling a true story, but I was in the dark about its plot, its external details, and its resolution. Now some of these have been revealed because I have lived through them. At the outset, I need to tell you some of the missing details, to illuminate what was obscure to me and to fill in the gaps for us both.

The light breaks through into what is essential for me— the sweet and stinging divine Mystery. The book begins

and ends with words rendered in new and old forms, telling in subtle and strong language that for God darkness and light are both alike. When God’s light breaks forth in human life it can appear as uttermost darkness as well as dazzling brightness, and it can take the form of a blinding fog in between. Nothing tells of this essential mystery better than Psalm 139, which is what comes before the beginning of the book and after its ending as well. If my small human life on earth is a parenthesis in God’s eternity, then I want versions of this psalm to form the brackets that hold me.

When I had no idea where I was going, this psalm gave me wings.

The facts are these: I was born at Emanuel Hospital in Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 1947. I grew as a child of the mountains, the forest, the rivers, and the sea. At the age of twenty-one, I left my home for university education in the Midwest. Immediately, I felt cut off from the sources of my life, as if I were in exile. This separation continued for about fourteen years. Each choice I made led to two others, all of them costing one price: home. The choices were all exception- ally good, but high-priced. I do not regret one of them. But, until my return, I never ceased to regret losing my sense of place. Once I asked a friend, rhetorically, How can we survive our choices? Years later, the answer burst out of me, and practically my first words to this same friend when we met again were, By learning from them!

When I was away from home on earth, I learned how much place meant to me. It was only in my return and reflection in that sacred place that I learned the

limitless importance of people in my life. The themes of my sense of exile and homecoming are present in this book, but locked inside them are deeper themes of which I had barely an inkling at the time of writing.

I was an only child, and acquired the strong instinct for solitude that characterizes the only child’s survival. It was a surprise to me and to my friends and family that I broke through my solitude at the age of twenty- three by falling in love with Phil and marrying him four days after I was ordained as the first woman deacon in the Episcopal Church in Oregon. We were married at the foot of the Mountain—my Mountain, the one I call Angel Mountain in this book, whose public names are Wy’East and Mt. Hood. Marrying Phil was the best thing I ever did for myself. His gifts to me were boundless. His love, his sparkle, his warmth, his outgoing energy, his playfulness, his anger, his music, his perception, his intuition, and above all, his steadfast faithfulness. From him I learned, often painfully, to be at ease with myself and to accept my own contradictions and complexity. And I learned that loving another meant challenging the beloved. Our marriage was totally dynamic and alive. It was sometimes stormy, sometimes despairing, but always a dance, always a blessing.

How I resisted relationship! I refused to view myself as a wife. I was a woman, an autonomous being, an individuating soul. To submit to the narrow cultural definition of wife was reprehensible to me. I insisted that Phil and I refer to each other as spouse to indicate our freedom from preconceived roles. We agreed that we wanted to discover and create a unique marriage as

we grew into it together.

The truth is, as much as I admired and adored Phil for his person and his gifts, I felt overshadowed. My parents had both been prominent lights, stars in their fields, and now I had married another star. Of course, to my disbelief, Phil said that he sometimes felt the same about me! The emotional insecurity each of us brought to our erotic partnership chafed at us. But we were both determined, even when the dance became a wrestling match—not between potential victors, but between mutually strengthening partners, each other s teachers. Phil was an extroverted, naturally outpouring public person, charismatic both in the popular and theological senses of the word. I was an introverted dreamer, a private mystic, a passionate but intimate friend and lover. In Phils great public light I sometimes felt invisible. In my intimate radiance, he sometimes felt inadequate or insignificant. We struggled far more against ourselves and our hurt feelings than we did against each other. For my part, the struggle was intensified by the differences in our size. Phil was sixteen inches taller than me and weighed exactly twice as much! We were never able to dance cheek to cheek, only nose to navel. But still, we were an attractive couple, and we were good together because of our differences. We both knew it, too. So we stayed together not only for the joy of loving each other, but for the priceless treasure of what we could learn.

In 1974, Phil and his wonderful mother, Betty, came with me to Philadelphia where I was ordained a priest with ten other women. That was the beginning of a very public emergence for me, which, oddly I suppose,

took me by surprise again. After the gift of himself, the second greatest gift Phil gave me was his family. It is quite indescribable. I shouldn’t have come through the last fifteen years at all well if I had been deprived of their love and loyalty.

It was in a special turbulence, then, that I began to write this book, for it was just at a time when I had torn myself away from those who loved me most on earth. All of this in my driving need to come home to the land not only that I loved, but that was indeed the land of my soul, my spirit’s country. Because my life with Phil from the beginning meant living away from Oregon, I entered our marriage with a divided heart. His natural resistance to uproot himself met my resistance to share myself fully in our marriage. I remained spiritually, and in some ways emotionally, reserved. I resisted the gifts that Phil was eager to share all around us in the natural environment of Minnesota. Phil resisted leaving his known world and coming to Oregon with me. Loneliness began to divide us.

When Phil realized how deep a need I had, he agreed to break through his resistances and to move with me, but by then I was no longer sure that I felt married enough to him to deserve or ask such a radical change of him. I did not want him to feel the resentment of a sacrifice not freely given, as I had come to feel.

In the winter when this book was born, I was grieving, a bear in a protective cave of private confusion. My father had died the year before, and my mother had been gone since shortly after our wedding. I was reflecting on the beautiful spiritual legacy my parents had left me, and feeling at the same time quite orphaned. Moreover, I had bought property in Oregon with my inheritance, and accompanied by Betty, my new mother-by-marriage and friend, I had taken possession of it on July 1 of the preceding summer. Phil and I had agreed to travel back and forth between Oregon and Minnesota until he could get a job as parish priest in the Portland area. We knew that this could take a year or even longer. We also knew that I needed time to sort out the confusion that had grown in my heart. The distance between our spirits that had developed in the last years led me to question whether or not I was married to the right person, whether or not I could experience fulfillment with him, and whether or not I should be married at all. Our tender love and respect for each other had not wavered, but our passionate desire to be together had dimmed in the darkness of my divided heart.

Phil encouraged me to use my solitude in Oregon to explore what I needed and wanted. When we were together, we talked and talked about it. This went on for two years. On top of the stress of our situation, I was experiencing a series of dreams which I felt I had to keep secret from Phil. They were dreams about his death. The first one came at nine o’clock in the morning of March 9, 1982, when I was conducting a retreat for my Wisdom House community in northern Minnesota at the vacation home of one of the women in the community. I woke up sobbing, for in my dream I had seen Phil drift away from me and out of his own body. He couldn’t speak, but he smiled and communicated spiritually to me: It’s all right, Honey. It doesn’t hurt. It’s peaceful! I’m all right. I love you. Then he left. I

was beside myself.

I began to have dreams about my fathers death as well. My father died six months after the dreams began, on October 22. The dreams about him stopped, but the dreams about Phil continued. I never told him, but I shared my anguish and confusion with close friends. And I cried copiously and secretly. Were these dreams precognitive and literal, as the dreams about my father had been, or were they a metaphor of the deep and painful transformation we were experiencing in our marriage? I had no way of knowing, so I responded like a person who had been dealt two hands, not knowing which one she would have to play in the draw. I prepared both hands—the literal and the metaphoric—as fully as I could.

On the metaphoric level, I committed myself with deep determination to work as hard as I could to find the truth about us. Did we belong together? Could I achieve the complete emotional honesty necessary to give our marriage its chance for fulfillment? Could I overcome my unfair protective feelings toward Phil which had kept me from telling him what I really needed and wanted in a lover, out of my fear of hurting his feelings, or of being disappointed? Could Phil, who had been my first and best playmate, become my true soulmate? Did I have the right to ask for the changes that might make that possible? On the literal level, the questions were equally hard. Could I bear his death? Could I be widow as well as orphan and still want to live? How would I feel if he died with all that was unfinished between us? Should I simply leave him first, to avoid the anguishing possibility of him leaving me in death? Slowly, I began to work out these questions, first by practicing being honest in sharing my darker feelings and deeper needs with Phil, and then by introducing the subject of our deaths by expressing feelings about my own death. This enabled us to explore more and more fully and deeply what each of us most longed for in life and from each other, and what we thought and felt about our own deaths. It was the hardest and most rewarding work either of us had ever done. I didn’t address it directly in this book, because I was too much in the midst of it to understand it fully or to be able to describe it, and because my book wasn’t about marriage, but about healing and creativity. I was living through the breaking of my own light into shards of opacity, sharp and mysterious to me, and writing the book was a lifeline—a spiritual anchor, an enactment of my deepest need to heal myself through a creative process which reintegrated my spiritual, emotional, and intellectual powers at a time of apparent disintegration in my life. The creative process became my link with integrity as I struggled for it in the most intimate aspects of my life.

Now, in the afterlight of experience, it seems important that I reveal what was happening more specifically in my life and soul at the time of giving forth the reflections that follow.

Our work came to a climax a year after I finished this book. It was June, and we were in Oregon together, working again in our garden, which I describe in the Humus chapter. Phil had begun a sabbatical summer, and in the spiritual reading which he had done he discerned a new direction for himself. In reading Scott

Peck’s now classic The Road Less Traveled, Phil realized that spiritual discipline was indeed a gift that he wanted to give to himself. He also convinced me that, since "love is desire for the spiritual growth of the beloved/’ the most loving thing I could do for him was to challenge him to grow. This meant telling him outright what was missing for me in our marriage! I had entered marriage with the notion that one hasn’t the right to ask another to change. So in those areas of our relationship where I felt lonely, I simply had accepted that Phil and I were different, and it was his perfect right not to be like me or able to share with me certain dimensions of experience which were inward and slow. He was outward and fast! Nothing wrong with that.

I had tried to make myself faster and more outgoing to meet him, but there were limits, probably where